"Live Above Weed, Live Above the Influence"

I read “Cathedral” twice because Janey was the Essayist. When I read it the first time it was a late night and after a few words into paragraph 57–“[t]hen I asked if he wanted to smoke some dope with me”–I thought I definitely was too tired, dozing off, and was making up lines for the story, but upon my reading that line in paragraph 57 a second time–to my surprise–the narrator and Robert were indeed about to “have…some cannabis” (64). Upon my second full reading of the story I came to the conclusion that because of the mentioning of the dope, the rest of the details in the plot and the overall message of the story thereafter are obscured and compromised.

I wish Carver had continued to be a “minimalist,” even though it was “a term that Carver himself did not like,” (introduction) and kept the dope passage from the plot. He could have then avoided the drug humor ambiguity that harms his message and made his actually insightful message “more powerful than [he] could have ever imagined”–yes that is a Star Wars quote, and you may be thinking “Robert you too could have made your writing ‘more powerful’ if you had not added that that unnecessary quote.” I understand that, but the quote is funny and fitting, so I shall keep it anyway.

The ambiguities caused by the dope passage begin in paragraph 78. The narrator’s wife seems to be quite high and tired when she says, “[s]ame here…[d]itto. Me too.” She says the same thing in three ways in an uncharacteristic way that seems humorous since she is high. We trust our narrator since there seems to be no bias or reason to think about his possibly altered version of that night. But when he describes the cathedral in paragraph 98, it seems as though he is just doing a poor job because it–understandably–would be hard to describe something so distinct to a blind person. But lest we forget he is high. It seems probable that on the night when he is with Robert, he was actually slurring his words and doing a poor job describing a cathedral, because of how high he was, not because it is a difficult task. Later, when the narrator starts to draw a cathedral so that Robert can run “the tips of his fingers over the paper” (119) to understand what a cathedral looks like, even the narrator himself describes his drawing as “[c]razy” (117). I was most upset because the mentioning of dope all the way back in paragraph 57 tarnished my ability to fully absorb Carver’s message in the last four paragraphs of the short story. When the narrator chooses not to open his eyes, the message of understanding what it is like to be a part of something bigger, or to be someone else–a blind person, is not what is first illustrated to me. I was stuck immaturely thinking about how the narrator is probably too high to want to open his eyes.

Overall Carver’s message was indeed relayed to me; however, I was upset that he was enough of a dope to leave the dope details of the plot in his story–they are just distracting. To Carver’s credit he does indeed mention why the narrator smokes dope: because after seemingly scary dreams he wakes up from them with “[his] heart going crazy” (85), so the dope is to calm him and keep him awake. Just to convey that the narrator has trouble sleeping so needs to smoke dope to sleep would not be a strong enough reason to keep the distracting dope passage my short story. But maybe Carver just likes dope, or thinks that it is funny to mention the drug in his short story the way I think it is funny to mention Star Wars. I wanted to keep my Star Wars quote in my blog, and maybe he wanted to keep his dope passage in his short story for solely personal reasons. Carver’s story is good, but because he is going for a more profound message in his story, it would have been much more effective to keep it above the influence.
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